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No Do-Overs: By 2009, James Washington believed he had gotten away with a 1995 murder, but then he had a heart attack, and on his deathbed, in a fit of remorse, he confessed to a confidant. ("I have to get something off my conscience," he told a guard in the jailhouse where he was serving time for a lesser, unrelated offense.)

However, Washington miraculously recovered from the heart attack and tried to take back his confession, but prosecutors in Nashville, Tenn., were unfazed. They used it to augment the sparse evidence from 1995, and in October 2012 the now-healthier Washington was convicted of the murder and sentenced to 51 more years in prison. [WSMV-TV (Nashville, Tenn.), 10-31-2012]

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Neurosurgeon Denise Crute left Colorado in 2005 after admitting to four serious mistakes (including wrong-side surgeries on patients' brain and spine) and left Illinois several years after that, when the state medical board concluded that she made three more serious mistakes (including another wrong-side spine surgery).

Nonetheless, she was not formally "disciplined" by either state in that she was permitted merely to "surrender" her licenses, which the profession does not regard as "discipline."

In November, Denver's KMGH-TV reported that Dr. Crute had landed a job at the prestigious Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York, where she treats post-surgery patients (and she informed Illinois officials recently that she is fully licensed in New York to resume performing neurosurgery). [KMGH-TV, 11-4-2012]